Mozilla Unleashes The Kraken

The Mozilla Project announced the release of a new JavaScript benchmark that focuses on real world applications and forward-looking applications. Called Kraken, the benchmark addresses the elements of the Web that people often complain about for being too slow.

"We believe that the benchmarks used in Kraken are better in terms of reflecting realistic workloads for pushing the edge of browser performance forward," Mozilla's Rob Sayre said in the Kraken announcement.

Kraken is free and open source and is continually going through tweaks and changes in an effort to evolve the benchmark quickly. Sayre says that Firefox 4 is roughly 2.5 times faster than 3.6 under the Kraken benchmark. Try the Kraken test for yourself here.

Google touts its Javascript engine version 8, among other things, as setting new speed records for its Chrome browser. Linux Magazine found during a benchmark test that the next Firefox generation can keep up with it.